By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

This book is a collection of eight original contributions (plus an introduction by the editors) targeting graduate students of linguistics as well as professional theoretical linguists. The nine chapters are as follows (contributors in parentheses): The function of function words and functional categories (M. den Dikken & C. Tortora), Verb second as a function of Merge (J.-W. Zwart), Nonnative acquisition of verb second: on the empirical underpinnings of universal L2 claims (U. Bohnacker), Clause union and clause position (J. Bayer, T. Schmid & M. Bader), Explaining Expl (M. Richards & T. Biberauer), Reflexives in contexts of reduced valency: German vs. Dutch (M. Lekakou), Simple Tense (G. Vanden Wyngaerd), Possessor licensing, definiteness and case in Scandinavian (M. Julien), Pronouns are determiners after all (D. Roehrs).

The Introduction (Dikken & Tortora) opens the volume providing summaries and brief discussion of the chapters.

Zwart's ''Verb second as a function of Merge'' proposes a new account for Verb Second (or 'V2'), i.e. the syntactic configuration in which the finite verb occupies the second position in Germanic languages. Zwart takes Merge to be an asymmetric operation that creates sisterhood dependencies, dependencies that may be marked by way of a linker element. Abandoning analyses proposing that V2 is the result of the verb moving to adjoin to a particular functional head (the Complementiser in most of them; the Complementiser or Tense in others), he argues that V2 is the ''side effect of a fronting operation'' (p. 13) with the verb acting as the linker marking the left edge of the constituent with which the fronted element merges. In order to demonstrate that V2 does not involve some (quasi-)criterial attraction of V to Comp (or T), he discusses a number of little-studied problematic facts surrounding the configuration, including a number of V2 asymmetries, non-standard V2 phenomena (such as quotative inversion), as well as V2 deviations, i.e. cases of V1 and V3.

Bohnacker in ''Nonnative acquisition of verb second: on the empirical underpinnings of universal L2 claims'' looks into Verb Second as well, although from the point of view of Second Language (L2) Acquisition. She sets out to disprove the hypothesis that the developmental path to acquiring a V2 language is the same for all L2 learners ''irrespective of their first language'' (p. 41). In doing so, she studies L1 Swedish learners of L2 German in order to determine whether V2 transfer will occur from Swedish to German - both languages solidly displaying the V2 property. Like Zwart, she then discusses Swedish V2 deviations typically resulting to V3, most of which are ungrammatical in German. After a review of the relevant literature and presentation of her own results, Bohnacker interprets the violation of German V2 by Swedish L1 learners as an interference from L2 English, due to ''the absence of nontarget V3 utterances in the learners who do not know English'' (p. 66)

In ''Clause union and clausal position'', Bayer, Schmid & Bader study an aspect of German complementation from both a cross-linguistic and parsing point of view. They begin from the observation that the ''intraposition'' construction in (1) is structurally ambiguous between a monoclausal structure, i.e. one employing clause union, and a biclausal one, the latter equivalent to (2):<pre>(1) daß Max mir das Lexicon zu kaufen empfohlen hatthat Max me the lexicon to buy recommended has(2) daß Max mir empfohlen hat das Lexicon zu kaufenthat Max me recommended has the lexicon to buy</pre>They use a corpus study, questionnaires and a reading time experiment to establish that, although the grammar of German allows both the clause union and the biclausal analysis for (1), the monoclausal structure is the one strongly preferred for it, due to parsing considerations and in the face of (2) as a more readily processable biclausal alternative. Moving on to Bangla, another OV language with similar constructions, they observe an analogous state of affairs. A syntactic analysis is offered in section 3 of the chapter.

Richards & Biberauer look at a paradoxical state of affairs, ''an unexpected asymmetry'' (p. 117), in Chomsky's latest work on phase theory, namely that expletives are predicted to be merged in the specifiers of C and T but not v (his three core functional categories). In their chapter titled ''Explaining Expl'', they first challenge the received account of expletives such as 'there' in 'there is a crocodile in the pool' as directly merged in the specifier of the Tense Phrase and go on to adopt the less popular alternative that expletives move from the specifier of vP, just like ordinary subjects. They provide synchronic and diachronic empirical support towards this from a number of Germanic languages while they relate the particular hypothesis to a theory whereby the source of features satisfying EPP as well as the size of the constituent they pied-pipe varies parametrically. The result has the theoretically attractive characteristic of allowing the merger of expletives only at the edges of (strong) phases: vP and CP.

''Reflexives in contexts of reduced valency: German vs. Dutch'' is a study in micro-variation regarding the reflexive element 'sich' (German) / 'zich' (Dutch). In it, M. Lekakou claims that the difference between the two elements is that, while 'sich' can function as an argument or as a non-argument valency reducer, 'zich' can only be a proper argument. She correlates this difference to the richness of the pronominal paradigms in the two languages, with the key lying with the availability of a designated non-inherently reflexive element in Dutch, namely 'zichzelf'. She consequently offers the beginnings of the related typology, albeit staying within West Germanic varieties. With a combination of discussing empirical evidence and arguing against previous analysis that take 'zich' not to always be an argument, she also links this difference between German and Dutch to the status of middles in the two languages.

Vanden Wyngaerd offers in ''Simple tense'' a novel analysis of simple tenses with emphasis on the English Simple Present. Departing from the observation that Simple Present is compatible with only a number of types of non-stative events, he offers the hypothesis that all these events are unified under their having ''Very Short Duration'' (p. 194). Consequently, Simple Present denotes an event whose interval ('E') is a subset of the reference ('R') interval, which in turn is co-extensive with the speech time one ('S'). Vanden Wyngaerd proceeds to correlate that to aspectual considerations, as, clearly, this is not the way simple tenses work in other languages; he then extends his account to states and generics, arguing that they too are perceived as involving successive intervals of Very Short Duration.

''Possessor licensing, definiteness and case in Scandinavian'' by M. Julien offers an overview of possessors in the Scandinavian DP. The chapter unifies the behaviour of possessors in Scandinavian varieties by appealing to the interplay between the categories of n, Possessor and Determiner, with the category n hosting a possessive feature interpreted as definite. She unifies the behaviour of possessors with the phenomenon of double definiteness in Scandinavian and, using this framework of hypotheses, she investigates feature checking within the Scandinavian DP. More specifically, Julien turns to the disjunction between phi-completeness and Case assignment, as Scandinavian pronominal possessors agree with the logical possessor for the former but with the possessee for the latter (Case).

Finally, D. Roehrs in ''Pronouns are determiners after all'' focuses on a matter that has received relatively little attention in the bibliography on pronouns: whether the equivalent of configurations like ''us linguists'' are best analysed as a determiner pronoun complemented by a noun or as an instance of apposition. Most of the investigations into the matter have sided with the one or the other point of view without a detailed look into the facts. Roehrs explores the behaviour and agreement patterns of pronouns co-occurring with nouns in German and goes on to argue for the first line of reasoning, what he calls the ''General DP-Hypothesis'' (p. 252), and against apposition.

EVALUATION:

I enjoyed reading this exciting book as thoroughly as very few collective volumes in recent years. To start with the basics, the solid and firm hand of the two editors shows through the impeccable editing throughout the book: from the selection of the papers included to the impressive absence of formatting discrepancies and typos (I have spotted only 'finladizes' on p. 174), unlike the customary situation with joint volumes. Turning to the selection of the work included in the volume, all eight chapters are of journal quality - generally perceived as higher than 'ordinary volume quality' - and bear the hallmark of having undergone scrupulous and meticulous editing, which makes them readable, clear and coherent - to say the least. On top of this, the topics included, the treatment thereof and the analyses put forward by the individual authors are also of the highest quality; this is the main reason I can open this review's evaluation section writing in terms of 'The function of function words and functional categories' being an ''exciting book''. Having said that, I feel I need to criticise one editing decision before moving, and this has to do with the title.

I am afraid that the book's title, 'The function of function words and functional categories', is hardly representative of its content as it stands. More precisely, the perspective adopted by all authors except Julien (who investigates the workings of nominal functional categories in the Scandinavian DP) is hardly with functional categories and their function in view. On the contrary, the majority of contributors investigate aspects of Germanic syntax with an emphasis on configurations and syntactic operations: Zwart looks at V2 as a function of Merge, refuting the central role of any particular functional category in it; Bohnacker investigates the L2 acquisition path of V2 oblivious to the possible role of any particular functional category; Bayer, Schmid & Bader investigate mono- versus bi-clausal intraposition in German and Bangla from a syntactic and a parsing point of view; Richards & Biberauer look into the derivation of expletive subjects in relation to phase theory; Lekakou zooms into the reflexive SIG in its West Germanic incarnations; Vanden Wyngaerd is concerned with the interpretation of simple tenses hardly mentioning the category Tense; Roehrs looks into the phrase structure of single pronouns. Therefore, I believe that a different equally attractive title for the book would be more suitable, given the Germanic and comparative focus of each one of the volume's contributions. On to the chapters, now.

Zwart's analysis of V2 is interesting for at least two reasons. First of all, it draws upon a wealth of previously overlooked evidence, mainly from Dutch. It emerges that the reason such evidence has not been closely studied until now is that it presents problems for analyses of V2 where the verb targets a particular category: C in the 'symmetric V2' analyses and C or T in the asymmetric ones.

This brings us to the second reason Zwart's contribution is of considerable interest: his account does not involve the verb targeting a particular category accompanied by material that must obligatorily dislocate to its host's specifier. Before continuing, let me point out that this coordinated migration of both the verb (via head movement) and whatever can sit in the specifier to its left is one of the problematic points in analysing V2 as a Complementiser (and / or Tense) related operation, as it more or less presupposes all finite Complementisers (to stay with symmetric V2 accounts) hosting some A'-related strong feature. Zwart resolves the problem and broadens the empirical base of the study of V2 (also capturing V2 asymmetries, non-standard V2 and V2 deviations) by claiming that Merge of x to y is an asymmetric operation and that it establishes a dependency that may be marked on the left edge of the y constituent by a linker element. In V2, the fronted constituent, x, merged to the left of the one it has moved out of, y, has this new Merge dependency marked by the verb acting as a linker at the left edge of y. By this hypothesis, Zwart does not have to make special reference to 'V2-dedicated' functional heads and their potentially odd properties and does not have to attribute non-standard V2 to hyperactive complementisers. However, his theory of Merge is vast in scope and while it can explain away V2, it is certainly necessary to be told what other grammatical phenomena it can account for and what other elements must be (re)classified as sisterhood-marking linkers, given the omnipresence of Merge in the building of syntactic configurations.

Bohnacker's chapter opens ambitiously, as a contribution to refuting the influential idea that L2 acquisition (of V2) follows a universal developmental path irrespective of the properties of L1, i.e. whether it is also a V2 language or not. Interestingly she discusses in some detail a number of V2 exceptions in Swedish that are absent in German. Hence, on a purely data level, this chapter, along with Zwart's one preceding it, makes a good place to look for a description of deviations from V2. The review of the existing literature on the acquisition of German (V2) word order is detailed and sets the scene for the study to be reported in an enlightening fashion, although the tone in places feels somehow contrived (''certain linguistic circles'' on p. 51) and even slightly unseemly (''acknowledged - though sometimes grudgingly and in footnotes'' on p. 53). Crucially, the insight that L2 English (a non-V2 language) might influence, or even hinder, the subsequent acquisition of ''L3'' German (as is the order people learn languages these days) is both very interesting, to say the least, and understudied. Understandably then, the author hardly supplies any bibliography regarding L2 influence on ''L3'', although work like Lozano (2002), contributions to Zobl & Goodluck (2003) and a number of papers by Ingrid Leung - to name but a small selection - concerns itself exclusively with this issue.

Turning to Bohnacker's carefully planned study itself, it indeed seems to suggest that Swedish L1 learners of German have no serious problems with German V2, unlike those previously exposed to English. However the sample of just 3 Swedish L1 speakers who only speak German, i.e. not English, is perhaps too small to draw any far-reaching conclusions. Admittedly, finding Swedish native speakers never exposed to English is virtually impossible (pp. 60-1) and the situation is remedied by the straightforward nature of the research's desideratum (that is, word order) and the satisfactory number of utterances recorded. Still, I am intrigued by the mismatch between the study's scope, as constrained by the general scarcity of evidence and the small size of the corpus, and the conclusions it is called upon to refute. In other words, the empirical study reported is important but not of a scale adequate to provide far-reaching insights into the acquisition of V2. Finally, the hindering role of English is presented as a mystery and no suggestions are offered thereon, although it becomes understood that this is due to the ongoing nature of the research.

''Clause union and clausal position'' by Bayer, Schmid & Bader brings together research on a variety of plains (usage, parsing, grammar) and a number of methods in order to explore the nature of intraposed German clauses. They show that the parser's abhorrence of intraposed biclausal structures - although grammar sanctions them - is underscored not just by processing, early closure type, considerations but also by the grammar-internal workings of agreement for a Status feature and the role of null Complementisers. As I already said above, this thesis is supported by a wealth of evidence from a variety of sources. In this way, native speaker intuitions and statistical evidence is cross-referenced and strengthened by experimental evidence. At the same time, the comparison with Bangla puts the whole inquiry in perspective, giving us the beginnings of an exciting account on how the (universal) parser treats OV languages, with potentially far-reaching implications for a variety of topics, including (but not restricted to) language change and the limits of language variation.

My interpretation of Bayer, Schmid & Bader's results would be, for instance, that intraposed biclausal structures - i.e. with the two verbs adjacent - would be cross-linguistically dispreferred and, if extant, diachronically short-lived. More generally, and commenting on the methodology followed in the chapter: the coupling of a strong syntax-theoretic analysis of a grammatical phenomenon with a parallel investigation of its behaviour in parsing, acquisition, language change or language pathology is a research strategy we need to see more samples of; not only because it puts phenomena outside narrow syntax into perspective and illuminates them in often unexpected ways, but also because it can work the other way round, providing indirect but invaluable evidence for (or against) a particular syntactic account.

''Explaining Expl'' is among the most carefully argued for analyses on expletive subjects, a hot topic in theoretical syntax for at least the last 15 years due to its apparent simplicity, its sometimes inscrutable complexity and its serious theoretical consequences once the (cross-linguistic) details are considered. Richards & Biberauer essentially provide a footnote to Chomsky's latest work on phases removing an asymmetry from it, by showing that expletive subjects originate in SpecvP and raise from there. In this way they resolve a number of paradoxes involving Agree relations between the expletive, Tense and the associate inherent in merging expletives directly with T (and its complement). The resulting welcome symmetry, i.e. that expletives are merged only at the only edges of phases, is corroborated by data in a number of Germanic languages.

The analysis is embedded within a complete parametric account on how the EPP can be satisfied across languages, which in turn provides a very promising framework for further investigation into the matter. Having said that, I have an observation to make on the framework itself. Recall that Richards & Biberauer argue that EPP satisfaction can vary across two parametric choices: the source of features satisfying T - the richly inflected V (as in Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998) vs. the SpecvP - and the size of the constituent they pied-pipe (the whole vP or smaller). Based on this, they are in a position to make the most probably correct prediction, supported by diachronic data across Germanic, that loss of inflection on V will force T to look for an EPP satisfier in SpecvP, therefore also expletives themselves. They are however careful to notice (on p. 136) that this is a one-way entailment and that expletives may exist in grammars where the source of EPP features is the richly inflected verb itself, as witnessed by both German and Icelandic. Setting aside the serious questions of how null subjects come about in non-richly inflected Chinese and Japanese, already an issue with Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou (1998), this leaves us with two serious questions: first, why this co-existence of expletives and EPP satisfaction by the inflected V should hold in German and Icelandic; second, how this framework can capture the observed incompatibility of expletives with null subjects.

Lekakou's meticulous treatment of the contrast between German 'sich' and Dutch 'zich' is based on Reinhart & Reuland's (1993) theory of reflexivity and links paradigmatic complexity to the kind of functions a pronominal can undertake. So, Afrikaans and Frisian possess no SIG element, hence personal pronouns will be restricted to argument positions. The availability of only a simplex SIG reflexive, like German 'sich', will add an element available for all reflexive uses, both in transitive environments and as a valency reducer. An even richer paradigm, possessing a simplex SIG reflexive as well as a complex one, like Dutch 'zich' and 'zichzelf', will entail specialisation of each as an inherent-argumental and a noninherent reflexive respectively - while both will be fully argumental and non valency-reducers. In this state of affairs, 'zelf' adds the possibility to choose from a set of possible referents, hence involves focus. On the other hand, 'zich' will always denote a singleton set (pp. 177-8), therefore it will be used only when there are no alternatives possible (either because of the verb's lexical specification or because of pragmatic considerations), as in the contrast in (3) involving an inherently reflexive predicate (from p. 176):<pre>(3) Zij gedraagt zich / *KarelShe behaves REFL / Karel'She behaves herself.'</pre>Although the whole analysis makes a lot of sense, I am left wondering on two matters of some importance. First, it is not entirely clear whether the -SELF element, claimed to be a kind of focus element that ''opens'' the set of possible referents, can be argued to be such in languages beyond the West Germanic sample of German and Dutch. At this point, a comparison with -SELF as instantiated in English would be certainly informative, especially if accompanied by a more concrete theoretical description of its purported focus function. Second, and given the importance the richness of reflexive paradigms plays in her account, I would expect the author to stress more the ''interchangeability'' of Dutch 'zichzelf' with transitive arguments - in contrast to the behaviour of 'zich', illustrated in (3) above; even more crucially, there is nothing at all in the paper on 'hemzelf / haarzelf' and their position and role in the noninherent column of the Dutch pronominal paradigm (p. 163) - especially in relation / contrast with 'zichzelf'. This is, I think, a serious lacuna in the account, as is presented in the chapter.

I found the analysis in Vanden Wyngaerd's chapter on simple (present) tense attractive in its simplicity and explanatory power. It makes a number of straightforward predictions stemming from the claim that the denotation of simple tenses is an interval having Very Short Duration, co-extensive with reference time (hence, speech time, in the case of Simple Present). One of the most attractive predictions is in the context of the usage of historical Simple Present in stories, as opposed to using Present Continuous (p. 198):

(4) Magda refuses to let the police in. She closes the door in their face.(5) Magda refuses to let the police in. She is closing the door in their face.

The ''sense of immediacy'' (ibid.) (4) conveys can be captured as a result of using the simple tense, hence presenting the closing event as having Very Short Duration, unlike what happens in (5), where the closing event has ''a certain extension'' (ibid.). Similarly, Simple Present is more appropriate for, say, presenting football matches in their quick play-by-play succession than for rowing events (p. 194). In section 4, Vanden Wyngaerd extends his account to cover states and in section 5 to generic sentences -which are conceived as consisting of successive intervals which last for a Very Short Duration. Given the strongly counter-intuitive feel of this proposal, although this is by no means an issue by itself, maybe it would have been necessary to present it in more detail and to argue for it in more depth. As a closing remark to this stimulating chapter, and given that the analysis in it capitalises on the role of time intervals, let me just point out that I am not sure it needs be framed in Reichenbachian terms - see, for instance, von Stechow's (1995) criticism thereof - and it could perhaps be the case that recasting it along the lines of work by Hans Kamp and Barbara Partee would be a more productive path to take.

''Possessor licensing, definiteness and case in Scandinavian'' by Julien scrutinises the workings of light n in Scandinavian and this category's role in double definiteness, especially in relation to its occurrence with possessors. The analysis unifies all the different possessive constructions as instances of the interplay among DP's functional categories and the ways this is conditioned by, among other factors, Agree and defective intervention effects. Its clarity of exposition and wide scope (over a number of varieties and a number of related constructions) as well as its explanatory strengths place this contribution among the most informative ones on the matter. At the same time, it also looks into empirical matters such as the irrelevance of focus to the fronting of possessors in Scandinavian and quasi-possessive (or 'pseudopossessive', on p. 241-2) constructions. My only comment regards extensions of the research presented here, extensions certainly beyond the scope of both the chapter itself and the volume as a whole: first, one would now like to see how Julien's core assumptions about the interplay of agreement with Case assignment would work in other languages beyond Scandinavian where (pronominal) possessors agree with the possessed noun, such as Romance (briefly mentioned in the context of a caveat on possessors making their DPs definite on p. 243) or Classical Greek. Second, it would be exciting to explore the relation of possession with definiteness in languages with izafet (such as Turkish), which are a bit like Armenian, also briefly touched upon on p. 225-6.

Research on the internal make-up of pronouns has flourished since the wider acceptance of the DP hypothesis in the eighties. A consensus on the functional shell of pronouns as D-elements of various sizes (a thesis represented by Cardinaletti & Starke 1999 and Déchaine & Wiltschko 2002) with an NP complement containing at least a semantically (and phonologically) empty noun seems to have been emerging. However, the long-standing debate on whether this NP complement is indeed a complement of the pronominal D itself or an appositive element, although contributed by several pieces of evidence presented from each side, had remained without any systematic treatment. Roehrs, using evidence from German, where the combination options are richer than, say, in English, and concentrating on the agreement properties of 'pronoun+nominal' constructions makes a very strong case against the apposition analysis and for the one I presented as the result of emerging consensus at the beginning of this paragraph. More importantly perhaps, this contribution fills in a specific gap in the literature, namely the one regarding what kind of arguments can be appealed to when making a case for or against a pronoun standing in complementation relation with a D element - this being a matter of some importance, as it goes beyond the confines of research into the internal structure of pronouns. Although the chapter could certainly benefit from clearer exposition in parts and stronger emphasis on both cross-linguistic aspects of the problem and the basic findings of the research it reports, it firmly sets the scene on what can be the criteria for deciding on complementation versus ellipsis. In this respect, as well as in establishing that complementation is the way to go in at least the case of Germanic pronouns lies the value and interest of this contribution.

Cardinaletti, Anna & Starke, Michal. 1999. The typology of structural deficiency: a case study of the three classes of pronouns. In H. van Riemsdijk (ed.) Clitics in the languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. 273-290.

Phoevos Panagiotidis is Chair of Humanities and Assistant Professor of Linguistics in Cyprus College, Cyprus. He is the author of the monograph titled "Pronouns, Clitics and Empty Nouns" (2002: Benjamins). He has also published articles in international journals (Lingua, NLLT, Linguistic Inquiry) and in jointly authored volumes on pronouns, the properties of Determiner Phrases as well as the status of arguments in null subject languages. Besides the above, his research interests include the nature of grammatical categories, language acquisition and breakdown, as well as the structure of English, Greek and the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund.